An Introduction to WebAssembly

The concept behind WebAssembly isn’t new and is based on work that was pioneered by Mozilla (asm.js) and Google (Native Client — NaCl and Portable Native Client — PNaCl).

One of WebAssembly’s main goals is parity with asm.js so I’ll give you a little background on that before we start digging into WebAssembly.

When I first heard of asm.js a few years ago I was excited. The ability to write code in C/C++ and have it compiled down into a special form of JavaScript that the browser could then run at near native speeds if it supported asm.js.